Monthly Archives: August 2014

Three years ago today, DigNuggetville was launched and keeping with tradition, I’m reposting the “Inaugural Post” outlining the mission and goals for DigNuggetville. Except for the auto industry comment, the blog has been true to the mission outlined below.

As I have been hinting to in recent posts, Year 3 of DigNuggetville will feature something totally new – something I have been brewing up for the past 3 months or so. I look forward to its debut in the very near future.

I hope the summer has been treating us well. For some time now, I have been cooking up the idea for – DigNuggetville – so WELCOME to the inaugural post.

The number one mission of this blog is to disseminate, distribute, broadcast, circulate, etc., nuggets. As you recall, nuggets are takeaways – a kernel of information you would like to stow away for future use.

Now in class, I made you record things in your journal (and yes I know a few of you out there still keep your journal alive). Either way, I want to continue our conversation and share more nuggets.

The recording of nuggets is strongly rooted in learning theory and is the foundation of my teaching philosophy. Broadly speaking, the main thrust of our discussion will involve (but not limited to) my main areas of interest:

Marketing Strategy

Marketing Research

Servant Leadership

Web 2.0/Social Media

Personal Selling and Sales Management

Consumer Behavior

Books/Business Media Recommendation

Networking (e.g., the old fashion face-to-face kind, as well as, the newer social media kind)

Most importantly, I would like to hear from you. If you are having a problem at work or want to talk through a career related decision, these are things I help out former students colleagues with on a weekly basis. In summary, if there is something you would like to ask, please post a question.

You never really know where a great nugget will come from and when I was reading Tina Fey’s memoir Bossypants (actually, I was listening to it in the car), her description of improvisational comedy sounded like something that would be very useful for coming up with new ideas. First, I will paraphrase her thoughts from the book and second, I will give you my interpretation on how improv could fit with innovation.

The Rules of Improvisation

The first rule of improv is to AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. The Rule of Agreement reminds you to respect what your partner has created and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with YES and see where that takes you.

The second rule of improvisation is to not only say yes, but to also say YES, AND. You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own. YES AND means, “Don’t be afraid to contribute.” It’s your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.

The third rule is to MAKE STATEMENTS. This is a positive way of saying “Don’t ask questions all the time.” In other words, whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. We’ve all worked with that person and that person is a drag.

The final rule of improvisation is THERE ARE NO MISTAKES only opportunities. In other words, there are no mistakes, only happy accidents. And many of the world’s greatest discoveries have been by accident. I mean, look at Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups or Botox.

I could not write down these ideas when in the car so I went to the library and took out the book to get the word-for-word translation. I thought these four rules would work well when the task at hand was to develop totally new ideas from scratch. When people are positive, the creative juices flow. Having teammates add something to your original idea will take it somewhere you didn’t expect it to go. Not asking questions or being negative will keep the stop signs from popping up. And not worrying if the idea is a good one or a mistake will free those cognitive juices up to focus on idea development.

Today we remember a true leader, Warren Bennis, who passed away last week. Professor Bennis was a leadership scholar who penned nearly 30 books, which have explored the importance of judgment, the need for transparency, the importance of being adaptive and the secrets of genius teams.

For Bennis, leadership was a personal journey, something individual and introspective that must be learned through life’s experiences. He was a staunch believer that leaders are made not born, formed out of “crucible” moments and struggles that prepare them to lead. As he wrote in On Becoming a Leader — essential reading for anyone — leadership is about self-discovery and self-expression. “Before people can learn to lead, they must learn something about this strange new world.” For Bennis, leadership was a personal journey, something individual and introspective that must be learned through life’s experiences. He was a staunch believer that leaders are made not born, formed out of “crucible” moments and struggles that prepare them to lead. As he wrote in On Becoming a Leader, leadership is about self-discovery and self-expression. “Before people can learn to lead, they must learn something about this strange new world.”

My favorite line from the quote above is “he was a staunch believer that leaders are made and not born.” I have linked to Professor Bennis’ ideas three times on DigNuggetville. The first was, not surprisingly, was to stress leaders are made, not born. The second was to stand on the shoulders of giants to highlight one of my favorite leadership quotes. Professor Bennis said,

Finally, in learning to fail…forward, I passed along Professor Bennis’ concept of the crucible. A crucible is an intense learning experience and for almost all of the leaders profiled in his book Geeks & Geezers, their crucible was a horrible failure. Leaders learn from their (horrible) experiences. They fail, but in failing , they then moved forward with their lives to do something even better than before. Without the their crucible, these leaders would have never reached this better place without their failure.

Go to a bookstore and pick up something excellent from Professor Bennis today…

Yesterday, we had an interesting nugget keyword – click bait – so let’s continue the trend and have another nugget keyword, bootstrapping.

Investopedia defines bootstrapping as, “A situation in which an entrepreneur starts a company with little capital. An individual is said to be boot strapping when he or she attempts to found and build a company from personal finances or from the operating revenues of the new company.”

The upside to bootstrapping is the entrepreneur maintains full control as no angel or venture capital money or influence is needed. The downside is, depending on the situation, it may take longer to scale as the entrepreneur only has personal funds and/or operating revenues to build the business.

As I hinted in yesterday’s post, I will have an announcement for something new coming soon and yes – it will be bootstrapped.

I was reading an interesting article on the Apple 2.0 blog and much of the discussion focused on Click Bait. The Urban Dictionary defines Click Bait as, “An eye catching link on a website which encourages people to read on. It is often paid for by the advertiser (“Paid” click bait) or generates income based on the number of clicks.”

Wikitionary take the definition one step further adding, “Website content that is aimed at generating advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs.”

I’m not sure how much click bait is out there but my guess is the percentage is high – very high. Sensationalistic headlines are not new – just take a look at the tabloids on a weekly basis – but that tradeoff of article quality or accuracy for quantity of eyeballs is pushing web sites to aim for the lowest common dominator just for the sake of revenue. These links/web sites do not generate much value (or none at all) and it’s only a matter of time before consumers are totally attuned to these tricks and therefore, tune out.

Very soon, I will be announcing a new something something from the realm of DigNuggetville, and it will be as far removed from click bait as one can possibly get.